Vegetarianism

Have you ever heard the joke “If we’re not supposed to eat animals, then why are they made of meat?” I’ve made this joke several times.

Of course, vegetarians who have studied biology can answer that people were not made to eat meat: the appendix and other organs (the spleen?) which appear to be nearly useless in modern people (particularly Americans, lol), which demonstrates that people were originally vegetarians. Is this evolution at odds with Creationism? I don’t think so. If we look at Genesis we see that God made humans and gave them all of Creation. Adam and Eve were to be the stewards of all the plants and animals God had made. Genesis 1:26-30 tells us that mankind was given “dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth” (NRSV is what I’m referencing here for Gen 1:27). In verse 28 God tells Adam and Eve to fill the earth and subdue it, have dominion over every living thing on earth. What will every living thing, including Adam and Eve, eat? Verse 29 answers this for us: God said He gave them every plant yielding seed that is all over the face of the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; also every beast and bird and everything that creeps, everything with the breath of life shall receive every green plant for food.

To me this sounds like the end, as described in Isaiah 11, when the wolf will lie down with the lamb. A wolf could only do that if it was not a carnivore. Clearly here, when the world was young, every animal and every human were herbivores. But obviously we were given permission to eat meat at some point, otherwise 1) God wouldn’t require animal sacrifices from us (with the priests and people consuming portions of the sacrifices), and 2) God would have struck people down for killing animals as food. Fast-forward to Genesis 9 and we read that God tells Noah to fill the earth, and then “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you, and just as gave you the green plants, I give you everything. Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.” Genesis 1 to Genesis 9 seems pretty fast; in my version of the bible it takes only about seven and a half pages to detail everything in between. But the time that passes between chapters is as follows:

Adam’s age when Seth was born 130 +

Seth’s age when Enosh was born 105 +

Enosh’s age when Kenan was born 90+

Kenan’s age when Mahalalel was born 70+

Mahalalel’s age when Jared was born 65+

Jared’s age when Enoch was born 162+

Enoch’s age when Methuselah was born 65+

Methuselah, the oldest man in the Bible, died the same year the Flood came. We can assume that since he was a righteous man, so blessed with the longest life of anyone, that he died shortly before the Flood. Noah was 600 when the Flood came, and Methuselah was 969 years old (for those not following along in a Bible, Methuselah was 187 when his son Lamech was born, and Lamech was 182 when Noah was born). Adding another 369 years for the difference between Methuselah and Noah, and the amount of time Noah was in the Ark (rain plus the time it took the water to recede so that dry land was exposed was less than a year), and we arrive at the number of years people were vegetarians/vegans before given permission to eat meat: 1,657. And why would people suddenly have permission to eat meat? Everything was destroyed in the Flood! No fruit trees or green plants were edible after being destroyed and/or under water for that long! But saving the animals in the ark wouldn’t have worked if the animals that are now carnivores were killing the other animals while they bobbed along in the ark. It’s not exactly saving each species if they’re eating each other. Sure, there were a few plants once Noah and crew unloaded, but not enough to feed Noah and his wife, his 3 sons and 3 daughters-in-law, and every animal on the ark.

HOLD UP! Does this mean that people evolved from herbivores to omnivores? Well, yeah, with the green light from God. I don’t really see evolution and Creation at odds, because I think they happened at different times. I think that Creation was how everything got here, and after the Fall things began evolving from the way they should be (as God made them), and strayed toward what they are now. And things are still changing.

Now, I don’t think it’s wrong or a sin or something to be vegetarian or vegan. This is just something I got to thinking about, how once upon a time, everyone was vegetarian.